Tag: CES
Hello and welcome to your post-CES edition of FWD. L’Oréal presented a wearable battery-free electronic UV sensor, and the WWE and NextVR are partnering to bring wrestling to your headset. Facebook cuts the clutter in newsfeeds to help users have more active and meaningful social interactions. Whilst this means organic reach on Facebook will decrease, the company is also testing a new section inside its app for local news, events and announcements. Amazon takes advantage of bringing in new ad tech tools for publishers and is launching its Transparent Ad Marketplace in Europe. If you missed out on CES, don’t worry, you can still catch up on the key trends and biggest developments from the exhibition by heading over to the OMD EMEA blog. Experts from across OMD have captured the biggest revolutions and evolutions of the week.
HEADLINES
INSIGHTS
COOL
DEEP READS
Another call for stories, we love it when you get involved! If you find anything interesting, please share using #OMDFWD.
Want to hear a joke? What’s the one thing you need at an electronics show? Electricity. And the joke is that’s exactly what they didn’t have for almost three hours at CES as the event was plunged into darkness following a power outage.
I was wandering through the impressive dedicated Samsung area admiring their 8k behemoth TV called The Wall when someone pulled the plug and the whole of CES was brought to a juddering halt for the first time in its 51-year history. It was actually quite eerie stumbling through the darkened auditorium with all the shiny new electronic kit now dormant and people using the lights from their smartphones to guide them to the nearest exit.
The heaviest January downpour in the desert City, since records began, washed out the event’s main auditorium and also resulted in Google’s flagship exhibition site to be temporarily closed. Twitter had a field day…
All this got me thinking that the gloom of the conference center following the failure of Nevada Power to get the power back on was kind of an allegory for this year’s show. Compared to recent years where we have seen the introduction of ground-breaking technology such as autonomous vehicles, virtual reality glasses, drones and the connected home, the 2018 event didn’t witness anything truly revolutionary. Yes, we did see much more connectivity than ever before and voice activation took a huge leap forward but there wasn’t any startling new tech to get the geeks salivating. In essence, much more a year of evolution than revolution.
That isn’t to say that there wasn’t anything to admire, so I have provided a run-down of the most interesting stuff that was on offer this year:
Automotive
Another year dominated by the car manufacturers with around 25% of the 3.2 million square feet of CES taken up by the auto giants. Many more examples of autonomous vehicles including a new bus called Olli presented by IBM Watson and a very similar looking product with added retail e-commerce opportunities showcased by Toyota’s e-Palette offering. But by far the most interesting concept was offered by Nissan who demonstrated their ‘Brain To Vehicle’ (B2V) technology which essentially allows your car to read your mind so improve your driving experience.
Over at the Sands convention center (kind of an off-Broadway tech experience of smaller players and start-ups) was a fascinating kick starter idea out of Italy which introduced the notion of ‘carbitrage’ for electric vehicle owners. The Charge Me concept is simple: if you have an EV with a full charge and another EV driver is nearby who is running low on energy, you can sell some of your ‘juice’ to them by connecting them via a dedicated cable.
Virtual Reality
The whole area of AR and VR was massive again this year at CES with Google in particular pushing their new Daydream product at every opportunity. Their presence at CES and on the Las Vegas strip was impossible to avoid which is interesting given their relative anonymity over the past decade.
But the most fascinating VR launch was from none other than iconic boxing legend Floyd Mayweather who held a press conference to announce the arrival of his new ‘bricks and mortar’ Mayweather boxing oriented gyms and virtual reality app. Ever wondered what it’s like to fight against the best pound-for-pound boxer who has ever lived? Well with the new VR app you can pit your wits, brawn and dexterity with the (virtual) man himself. Mayweather demonstrated the app himself and despite some nifty footwork and punishing blows from the man himself, the virtual version took the bout.
Voice
Alexa, Cortana, Siri, Assistant, Bixby etc. were all to be found controlling anything from your car to your washing machine. The battle for dominance clearly seems to be between Amazon and Google as they try to establish their voice activation variants as the dominant player.
Gadgets
ForwardX Robotics rolled out a four-wheeled travel bag that will follow its owner around the airport without the need to drag it. The ‘smart bag’ has several onboard cameras to detect its user and also uses AI to avoid banging into other people and their carry-on luggage. It also has the capability to send a message to its owner if they stray too far from it in Duty Free or when the battery pack is getting low.
And finally my favourite gadget of the event has to be the super cute Sony Aibo puppy. This robot dog was the star of the show with its AI controlled actions and ability to react to commands.
Want more round-ups from CES? Click here for Tech East and West round-ups by OMD’s Chrissie Hanson.
Want to hear a joke? What’s the one thing you need at an electronics show? Electricity. And the joke is that’s exactly what they didn’t have for almost three hours at CES as the event was plunged into darkness following a power outage.
I was wandering through the impressive dedicated Samsung area admiring their 8k behemoth TV called The Wall when someone pulled the plug and the whole of CES was brought to a juddering halt for the first time in its 51-year history. It was actually quite eerie stumbling through the darkened auditorium with all the shiny new electronic kit now dormant and people using the lights from their smartphones to guide them to the nearest exit.
The heaviest January downpour in the desert City, since records began, washed out the event’s main auditorium and also resulted in Google’s flagship exhibition site to be temporarily closed. Twitter had a field day…
All this got me thinking that the gloom of the conference center following the failure of Nevada Power to get the power back on was kind of an allegory for this year’s show. Compared to recent years where we have seen the introduction of ground-breaking technology such as autonomous vehicles, virtual reality glasses, drones and the connected home, the 2018 event didn’t witness anything truly revolutionary. Yes, we did see much more connectivity than ever before and voice activation took a huge leap forward but there wasn’t any startling new tech to get the geeks salivating. In essence, much more a year of evolution than revolution.
That isn’t to say that there wasn’t anything to admire, so I have provided a run-down of the most interesting stuff that was on offer this year:
Automotive
Another year dominated by the car manufacturers with around 25% of the 3.2 million square feet of CES taken up by the auto giants. Many more examples of autonomous vehicles including a new bus called Olli presented by IBM Watson and a very similar looking product with added retail e-commerce opportunities showcased by Toyota’s e-Palette offering. But by far the most interesting concept was offered by Nissan who demonstrated their ‘Brain To Vehicle’ (B2V) technology which essentially allows your car to read your mind so improve your driving experience.
Over at the Sands convention center (kind of an off-Broadway tech experience of smaller players and start-ups) was a fascinating kick starter idea out of Italy which introduced the notion of ‘carbitrage’ for electric vehicle owners. The Charge Me concept is simple: if you have an EV with a full charge and another EV driver is nearby who is running low on energy, you can sell some of your ‘juice’ to them by connecting them via a dedicated cable.
Virtual Reality
The whole area of AR and VR was massive again this year at CES with Google in particular pushing their new Daydream product at every opportunity. Their presence at CES and on the Las Vegas strip was impossible to avoid which is interesting given their relative anonymity over the past decade.
But the most fascinating VR launch was from none other than iconic boxing legend Floyd Mayweather who held a press conference to announce the arrival of his new ‘bricks and mortar’ Mayweather boxing oriented gyms and virtual reality app. Ever wondered what it’s like to fight against the best pound-for-pound boxer who has ever lived? Well with the new VR app you can pit your wits, brawn and dexterity with the (virtual) man himself. Mayweather demonstrated the app himself and despite some nifty footwork and punishing blows from the man himself, the virtual version took the bout.
Voice
Alexa, Cortana, Siri, Assistant, Bixby etc. were all to be found controlling anything from your car to your washing machine. The battle for dominance clearly seems to be between Amazon and Google as they try to establish their voice activation variants as the dominant player.
Gadgets
ForwardX Robotics rolled out a four-wheeled travel bag that will follow its owner around the airport without the need to drag it. The ‘smart bag’ has several onboard cameras to detect its user and also uses AI to avoid banging into other people and their carry-on luggage. It also has the capability to send a message to its owner if they stray too far from it in Duty Free or when the battery pack is getting low.
And finally my favourite gadget of the event has to be the super cute Sony Aibo puppy. This robot dog was the star of the show with its AI controlled actions and ability to react to commands.
Want more round-ups from CES? Click here for Tech East and West round-ups by OMD’s Chrissie Hanson.
Welcome to the CES 2017 OMD FWD special. As the dust settles on the Mojave Desert, there’s a quiet acknowledgement of Amazon’s Alexa triumph as the most widely integrated technology. But it’s still early days in voice technology, with little platform loyalty and leadership positions yet to be cemented. We expect 2017 to be an incredibly exciting year for voice AI. Bloomberg reports that the potential is huge as the technology is exponential, with voice AI reaching 40 million homes by 2021.
Elsewhere mobile devices explored 3D cameras, smart home technology merged with mobility, cars got smarter and televisions became thinner. With so much coverage of CES, explore our round-up of the most interesting news articles.
HEADLINES
- In the final tally of the show, Amazon Alexa reigns as the ‘Grand Winner’, and they didn’t even have a booth. Quartz summarises the best in show
- One of the biggest brand stories was from Mattel who launched a kid-focused Echo alternative which is due to launch June 2017. Our children will use these technologies from a very early age as more competitors come into the market
INSIGHTS
COOL
- Robots were everywhere and here are 4 robots you might want in your home. Our money is going to Kuri
- HTC wants to drive the VR revolution by introducing a subscription service: ‘The Netflix for VR’
- A digital sole which learns your running patterns and adapts to support you during terrain changes, or if you began to pronate due to tightness of muscles
- A mechanisation of a human being came in the form of the exo skeleton which has the promise to give mobility to the disabled.
- For a full run down on the coolest gadgets in the show, read our round-up here
DEEP READS
As ever, please read, learn and share away, #OMDFWD
Well, as predicted in my pre-CES piece, the main areas of interest were automotive, robots and VR, although my confident prognostication that ’embeddables’ was going to be the breakout technology for 2017 proved to be a tad off the mark. Actually I was way off. But you can expect me to reuse the same prediction every year until it finally happens…
Anyway, swiftly moving on, let’s take a closer look at how the more successful predictions came to fruition.
AUTOMOTIVE ACCELERATED
Your car is now the largest connected piece of technology that you can own. And every single one of the manufacturers displaying their wares focused on the progress they have made in connecting your vehicle to other devices.
The major innovation for 2017 was the use of voice activation. Both Ford and VW announced their respective collaborations with Amazon ‘Alexa’ whilst Nissan talked about their association with Microsoft ‘Cortana’. Talk to your car and it will politely talk back, whilst simultaneously acting upon your every whim at home – switch on your lights, adjust the central heating or even check what’s in your fridge (assuming you have the right connected appliances of course).
Alternatively, talk to Alexa at home and control various functions of your car, like turning on the air conditioning or checking how much fuel you have left.
And talking of Nissan, I watched the keynote speech by Renault-Nissan CEO, Carlos Ghosn, at the Westgate Pavilion, where he stated that there will be more change in the automotive sector in the next 10 years than there was in the last 50 years.
He confidently predicted that by 2030 a quarter of all vehicles on the road will be autonomous (and added that this was a “conservative estimate”). He also talked about their alliance with NASA on developing the revolutionary Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) system. What problem does it solve? Well autonomous systems follow strict road rules (such as, your car can never cross solid road lines) so SAM uses a human interface to offer ‘real time’ solutions to complex ‘real world’ problems that even sophisticated algorithms can’t figure out.
Elsewhere we saw China’s answer to Tesla, Faraday Future, launch its vision of an electric production car (as opposed to the outlandish FFZero1 hypercar concept which it revealed at last year’s CES).
The unimaginatively entitled FF91 is fully electric, autonomous and has very cool motorised doors. There are no firm details on when it will be launched or the price but you can put down a $5,000 deposit to get yourself on the list. However, given some of the negative stories circulating about the financial viability of Faraday I won’t be one of them.
TV WENT ON A DIET
Can you imagine a TV as thin as a credit card? Well, LG can. And it did: the new LG Signature 4K OLED W series. The W stands for wallpaper and refers to the TV’s new “picture-on-wall” design. Its dual system has the main display underpinned by a Dolby Atmos Soundbar. That very same Soundbar also houses the TV’s primary guts, HDMI inputs and so forth. But it’s that screen which is the key feature coming in at a mere 2.57 millimeters thick.
VR WENT FROM INTERACTIVE TO IMMERSIVE
Samsung finally demonstrated how far VR has come since the Oculus Rift took CES by storm just a few short years ago. Their five-arena immersive oasis was simply stupendous and one of the real highlights of this year’s show. Want to take a bobsleigh ride, fly shotgun on a stunt plane, throw buildings at a rival robot or even go on a Star Wars X-Fighter mission? No problem, Samsung Gear offered the opportunity to experience them all, and provide a genuine taster as to what immersive entertainment will become over the next few years.
ROBOTS GOT WEIRD
Smart home assistants, such as the Amazon Echo or Google Home, became an unexpected Christmas 2016 consumer hit. But given the new kit we saw on display at CES this week, it will make these simple voice activated units obsolete rather swiftly.
Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics demonstrated its Sophia Bot late in 2016 and, although it was a huge leap forward in the development of animated expressions/emotional intelligence, it still looked somewhat creepy. Or is it just me?
At CES it showcased the latest version of the same technology, which took strange to a whole new level. Professor Einstein is a 14.5″ Wi-Fi-connected robot which is designed along the lines of Amazon Alexa, albeit with a very different outward appearance…
RANDOM STUFF THAT NO-ONE EXPECTED
This is the Kickstarter style, off-the-wall, oddball tech that nobody could have predicted apart from the crazy people who invented it. And as usual, there was plenty on display.
For starters, what about the Kolibree? It is the world’s first toothbrush with Artificial Intelligence. With the associated app you can gamify your brushing experience (seriously, you cannot make this stuff up) to ensure you clean your teeth properly.
Not convinced? Me neither. So next up, we have VR shoes from Taclim. The footwear literally allows you to walk in the shoes of your virtual heroes and can simulate a variety of terrains (from sand to snow). They look a bit like Croc sandals so even though the enhanced gameplay might be cool, you certainly won’t look chic whilst wearing them.
Talking of cool, what about a levitating speaker system? Well thanks to the Crazybaby Mars you can have your mind officially blown. It looks a bit like an Amazon Alexa, replete with funky blue lights (naturally) and a free floating dome. It’s also not just a gimmick as the sound quality is incredible. Until I saw and heard it, I had no idea that I needed one in my life.
So there you have it, another tech fest over for another year. Did CES 2017 live up to expectation? Whoa, did it ever. Leaving Las Vegas. And out.
This article was originally posted at M&M Global – http://mandmglobal.com/2-4-million-square-foot-of-whoa-ces-2017-reviewed/
We are just one week into 2017 as 200,000 people ascend on Las Vegas for the 50th year of the Consumer Electronics Show. Whilst CES has become the place for marketers to see the latest and greatest, meet with agencies and partners, and just have a good time, the real reason to attend CES is to get your innovation agenda in place for the new year.
Every marketer should adopt an innovation mandate – be it a manifesto, a framework or a roadmap. Innovation is not an accident. The best innovation is intentional. This is the difference between true innovation and ideation. Marketing innovation is separate from creative ideation. The two often get confused as the same. Innovation is the delivery of ideas that causes disruption or accelerates opportunities.
Successful innovation mandates are:
- True to a marketers’ organisation and brand
- Measurable (good or bad)
- Long-term visions with short-to-mid-term flexibility
- Supported broadly across the organisation (top down, bottom up)
- Safe zones for an organisation to push teams
- Not an accident: They are carefully designed and structured
If done right, marketing innovation removes friction, tells a story and allows for emotions to overweigh data. Sometimes you need to fire before you can aim. Innovation mandates will allow you to define the disruption opportunities (think Netflix 1.0–DVD distribution) as well as acceleration opportunities (think Netflix 2.0–content creation).
As you continue to walk the halls of CES or get enamoured by what’s in the trades this week, don’t forget that innovation is intentional. Reaching consumers in new ways and in new places is seldom achieved on just a leap of faith. Spend time analysing your innovation agenda and updating it for the new year, new gadgets, new trends and new opportunities.
At CES 2017, OMD has focused on Immersive Marketing at the OMD Oasis, an invite-only program structured to galvanise our clients, our global leadership and Omnicom friends around innovative conversations and extraordinary ideas. Learn more at ces.omd.com and follow #OMDOasis and @dougs_digs.
2017 marked both the 50th anniversary and my first attendance to CES. I couldn’t have been more excited to see it all in action. Whilst it seemed nearly impossible to experience every single inch of the vast booths of new tech, entrepreneurs, and titans of innovation, the OMD Word team and I eagerly explored as much as possible, gaining several thousand steps on our wearables in the process.
It comes as no surprise, CES delivered on being a fantastic incubator for viewing trends within innovation. As these trends reach mass consumers, social media becomes the hotbed capturing consumers’ responses and participation within these trends. Three key themes continuously bubbled up to the top when walking the conference. While not entirely new to the world of CES, these themes have the capability of reshaping consumers’ behaviour on social media. We’ll call them the three A’s of CES 2017: Autonomous, AI, and the prospective bell of the ball, Alexa.
First up, Autonomous
Autonomous cars increased in sophistication and the metaphorical road got way more crowded this year. After achieving the ability to take consumers from one place to another, the focus expanded to how these vehicles could communicate with each other making transportation even safer and more efficient by reducing traffic buildups. How consumers will occupy their time once the physical act of driving is removed as a necessity still remains to be seen. But it allows for a variety of entertainment and connection opportunities via a new touch point of consumers’ attention.
AI
Throughout the conference, AI weaved its way across robotics, to self-driving cars, to health and fitness, and everything in between. With the ever-growing surge of big data, 2017 AI fosters personalization of experiences across robotic home companions, sleep technology, and intelligent assistants. Even better, the more these AI devices learn and interact with consumers the smarter they become. This especially rings true within health and fitness, where there was a large presence of ingredient brands to grow the market of bio feedback. Gamification of health and fitness nurtures the socialisation of precise bio feedback potentially popping up on social platforms, as consumers have increased motivation to do better and beat out their friends and family.
Alexa
With the rise of voice activation technology, such as Alexa, consumers will be given new tools and ways to connect within their social spheres generating new types of shareable content. Both editorial publishers and social platforms alike will be responsible for finding the interesting and compelling way to share the new consumer experiences. Practically at every turn, companies were trying to dovetail voice activation tech, Alexa specifically, to their products in conventional and unconventional ways. Voice analytics, including emotional tracking through voice, was lightly sprinkled through the conference creating opportunities for consumers to deepen their understanding of their social interactions both within the physical and digital world.
As the three A’s of CES 2017 continue to trickle out to mass consumers, cultural adoption of connected, intelligent devices across multiple touch points within their lives will advance. With the ease of connecting to everything and the sheer immediacy of it, one hypothesis I have is consumers’ social platform behaviours will start to merge and be less siloed. Consumers’ mindsets will shift from needing to share a specific, individual piece of content across a specific social platform, to having a multi-pronged experience to share across their social ecosystem. In this collapse of the more traditional existing social silos, social platforms will need to adapt to the new consumer demand of a social ecosystem rather than an echo chamber. However in the true spirit of innovation at CES and perpetually dynamic nature of human social behaviours, only time will tell if I’m right or wrong.
Similar to previous years, the social platforms themselves got in on the action of CES.
Facebook lead the pack as the “official” social media partner of CES 2017. Pumping out exhaustive editorial content, on-site interviews, and virtual tours, Facebook served the role of a crucial resource of information for attendees. Not surprisingly, Twitter was not going to let the Facebook relationship go unanswered. Continuing to position themselves as the real time platform, Twitter showed up with prominent on-site branding and a heavy focus on live streamed content, on the heels of their announcement of 360 live videos.
All in all, CES 2017 did not disappoint and perfectly served up the recipe of its 50 years of success. Our industry moves fast and in unexpected directions sometimes, and CES continues to be the conference where we can get together to be delightfully surprised and inspired.
A sophisticated marketing technology and advertising technology stack has had a transformative impact on performance marketing over the past 15 years, but we are now starting to see a similar scale of impact on marketing further up the funnel. To gain attention, change perceptions and drive desire, we need to adopt cutting-edge automation and cognitive technologies to the realm of content distribution and customer engagement strategies.
Yesterday at the OMD Oasis I joined Twitter’s Global Head of Content Strategy, Stacy Minero, The Weather Company’s CEO, Cameron Clayton, The Washington Post’s Director of Strategic Initiatives, Jeremy Gilbert and Quartz’s Co-Founder Zach Seward, to discuss Bots, APIs and AI.
The rise of the bot
Over the past five years, we have seen the rise of a range of new digital technologies that are transforming the way that we interact with content and services. The website and the mobile app have now been joined by the bot and the voice based skill in platforms, such as Amazon Alexa.
Bots enable us to automate various tasks, such as shopping bots that guide users through purchases or chat bots that enable more conversational interactions. After much discussion, we concluded that bots are over-hyped because the most effective bots are the ones we don’t notice, that pass under the radar to a great extent.
Both publishers and brands have been utilising bots at scale over the past year. Quartz, for instance, have a conversational news bot that delivers news like a messenger conversation, dialling up detail as requested by the user. Bots enable the automation of much of the low-level interaction required to drive a more personalised experience. Brands too are experimenting with bots. Last year at OMD EMEA we have worked with clients to deliver bot based interactive story lines and shopping services in Facebook messenger and we expect many more brands to experiment with bots to drive deeper more immersive experiences throughout 2017.
Imbedding AI in bots
The cutting edge of bot technology has AI embedded within. That AI can be in many forms, such as natural language inference, meaning a bot can understand, ‘will I need my umbrella in Miami’ is a question about expected rainfall. Equally, it may be machine vision that recognises key elements in photos and video, or smart home connectivity that anticipates the consumer’s need to switch their lights on or heating off when they are more than 10 miles from home.
It was commented that every brand should now record and transcribe every conversation or interaction with their consumers. In those conversations, are the non-typical interactions that define the specifics of a brand’s purpose, that will ultimately drive the differentiation of their AI over any potential competitors. Waiting for someone else to solve those problems for you will be a significant business risk.
APIs
APIs (application programme interfaces) are the plumbing that connects these diverse services together. Solving problems like the translation between languages, or the ability to recognise faces is very hard, but once it has been perfected it becomes an API open to all, thus massively reducing the cost to implement such a service.
We can also add a range of immersion technologies from 360-video to Augmented Reality through to Virtual reality to the list of options available to the modern marketer. They may not scale instantly but they are showing huge potential to drive deeply immersive experience. The technology announced at CES such as the Intel Project Alloy VR headset should be watched closely. These technologies have been complex and unstable until recently, only now can we think of them as strategic platforms that can scale and be relied upon.
So how should brands think about the opportunity?
Whilst the technology is complicated the task remains simple. We need to identify the potential sources of growth and solve issues for the audiences that represent that growth. A clear insight about consumer behaviour and beliefs, aligned with an understanding of the technology will enable us to define solutions that create value; to minimise purchase friction, maximise salience and impact and drive experiences that are both memorable and shareable. Traditional advertising has an enormous role, signposting at scale to these great experiences and services where and when they are most relevant to the specific consumer segment.
All of the required pieces are now available so that we may be able to transform brand and content marketing to the same degree as we have already with the performance element of the marketing mix.
To find out more about the OMD Oasis programming at CES 2017, please visit CES.OMD.COM
At a convention powered by the latest in technological innovation, it was the art of storytelling that captivated the marketing community at OMD Oasis. Claudia Cahill, OMD Content Collective’s President, led a panel comprised of the industry’s leaders in storytelling: Steve Peace (SVP International Media, Sony Pictures), Brad Jakeman (President, PepsiCo’s Global Beverage Group), Dawn Ostroff (President, Condé Nast Entertainment), Mike McCue (CEO Flipboard) and Bryn Mooser (Co-Founder & CEO RYOT).
Each panelist offered a distinct and fascinating perspective on the challenges and contradictions inherent in storytelling in a world that demands both short, snackable content as well as complex, immersive stories that fuel our deepest passions.
Whilst all agreed that brand storytelling has become a much more complex challenge because of both consumer expectation and the proliferation of platforms and channels, the solutions varied. Steve explained that at Sony Pictures, “a narrative structure has been created in which the first 3 seconds are comprised of 5 to 10 shots; a visual mnemonic of the very best shots in our film that pulls you into watching the entire trailer’’. And it’s a narrative structure that is powered by reams of data.
At PepsiCo, Brad built a Content Center because “it was the only way to create the type of content needed to keep pace with the need for innovation’’. He explained that technology provides enormous opportunity for the expression of ideas but the content is critical. “The holy grail is how deeply someone has engaged with the content and it’s not about reach’’.
Dawn shared how she started the Next Gen Studio at Condé Nast to create a storytelling capability on every single platform and admitted that making content for a younger, Millennial audience is challenging because “GenZ have grown up on a diet of content snacks’’ and that there remains a gap in longer form content that is made specifically for them. Mike reminded the audience of the importance of having clear and meaningful objectives and that “really high-quality stories should be the goal’’, not short snackable content; “any story, short or long, has the power to move the world forward’’.
Disrupting the content creation process
The opportunity to break the rules and to disrupt the content creation process was debated and Bryn explained that the mobile phone has been the vehicle for the democratization of filmmaking. It made it possible for anyone out there to shoot a film and tell a great story. Moreover, with Facebook and YouTube 360, the way you look at video has fundamentally changed; you’re now able to step inside the story, to experience what the person holding the camera sees and feels, bringing people right up close to events around the world. And that closeness is what fuels peoples’ voices and passions.
The discussion shifted into learnings for the audience and there were five key takeaways:
- Global vs. Local: Ensure stories are relevant across different geographies
At PepsiCo, a content slate is developed for brands and countries in advance so that the right content is crafted. Interestingly, 90% of their content is now developed globally and shared across territories.
- Immersive Storytelling isn’t achieved solely by technologies and tactics like VR and AR
Narrative structure can be incredibly immersive. Consider content strategy over longer timeframes to build out worlds and/or characters, and give people a peek into that.
- Be nimble and open to change.
The technology still has to catch up with the vision of storytellers so be prepared to try new things.
- Focus
With so many choices for how and where to tell your story, it’s critical to simplify the complexity and focus on the goal of your story.
- Be Passionate.
Storytelling gives meaning to the world so embrace the emotion, chaos, and challenge of it.
To find out more about the OMD Oasis programming at CES 2017, please visit CES.OMD.COM
The prospect of returning to CES ignites in many an unmistakable sense of dread and excitement.
Each year, the square footage of the show floor creeps upwards so that there’s now over 2.5 million net square feet of exhibit space to potentially navigate through and get thoroughly immersed (or lost) in.
The act of purposeful curiosity
Each year, the predictions touting what we can expect to see start flooding our social feeds about a month out. Already I can expect to hear about driverless cars (again), different realities (virtual, augmented, and mixed), and we’ll see the latest developments in robotics and Artificial Intelligence. We’ll also see more connected devices and wearables that promise to churn out more data streams about our bodies than ever before. And of course, there will be enormous TV screens.
After all, it wouldn’t be CES without those gigantic booths containing massive, shiny, pixel-packed TV screens that would dwarf a large conference room wall. But as we scan these articles and start to pack our bags for Vegas (don’t forget your flat shoes and mobile phone portable charger), it seems to me that the most important part of going to CES is the act of purposeful curiosity. To actively and consistently question how the latest whirring and blinking gadgets affect our clients and their business goals, and whether those flashing, oddly-named devices are significantly changing the way we live and work must be our goal as we move through the many halls of the convention center.
Question everything
At OMD, we believe that it is critically important to question everything that we do in order to make our clients’ marketing ever more powerful, effective, and accountable. CES represents a fantastic source of ideas and inspiration for jump-starting how to think differently about the year ahead, and so we go with an open mind and a desire for disruption. Interestingly, it’s been said CES 2017 will be another year of incremental improvements rather than grand revolution. But isn’t that the very definition of ‘innovation’ and the goal of so many marketers?
When I hear that CES is going to reveal the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence, it’s the potentially transformative impact on businesses that I’m most interested in learning about. When I read about the continued expansion of wearables and lifestyle accessories, I want to understand what this means for brand authenticity and purpose; how can I harness and blend different data sets to create the kind of value and utility that builds brand fans? And finally, when I put on yet another VR headset or see the next iteration of AR, I ask myself ‘how this is deepening the emotional connection and quality of brand storytelling?’
Take a tour
CES is only as rewarding as you make it. My advice to those venturing to CES for the first time: take a tour. Curation is key to making sense of the vastness of the various Tech Halls and it takes effort to extract the insights and lessons that will power your brand thinking in 2017. Personally, I’m putting myself in the hands in the expert curators; OMD’s Ignition Factory will guide me through the latest innovations that are changing the way we create and distribute content, so that I can then decide what are the inventions and improvements that I should weave into my clients’ future marketing and communications programs.
Ultimately, we go to CES to see things first, to stay ahead of the competition by asking the smarter questions, and we guide our clients on the innovations that matters most.
To find out more about what has OMD has planned at CES 2017, please visit CES.OMD.COM
